HMM: Justice Dept. Is Said to Investigate Ticketmaster’s Parent Company: The inquiry predates the botched presale of Taylor Swift tickets this week and is said to focus on whether Live Nation has abused its power in the live music industry. “Members of the antitrust division’s staff at the Justice Department have in recent months contacted music venues and players in the ticket market, asking about Live Nation’s practices and the wider dynamics of the industry, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is sensitive. The inquiry appears to be broad, looking at whether the company maintains a monopoly over the industry, one of the people said. . . . Officials in the Biden administration have spent the last two years trying to push the boundaries of antitrust law. The Justice Department has mounted several challenges to major mergers, successfully persuading a judge to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster but losing some other cases. The Federal Trade Commission has sued to block Meta, Facebook’s parent company, from acquiring a small virtual reality start-up.”
Archive for 2022
November 19, 2022
NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF METRIC FOOTBALL: FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s extraordinary own goal.
On Friday, I suggested FIFA’s tolerance of Qatar’s disregard for human rights should be the final nail in the global soccer body’s coffin.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino apparently agrees with me.
That’s the only logical conclusion to make from the absurd rant Infantino offered in Qatar on Saturday. Just one day before the opening game of the 2022 World Cup, Infantino began by declaring, “Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker.”
These are interesting feelings for a Swiss-Italian multimillionaire heterosexual. No worries, Infantino was quick to explain why he can relate to gay people and migrant workers who are fearful of the treatment Qatar may afford them: “I know what it means to be discriminated and bullied as a foreigner in a foreign country. As a child, I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles. I was bullied for that.”
That is a real quote.
Infantino believes that being bullied as a red-headed kid with freckles is the same as thousands of migrant workers dying of heat exhaustion after being denied sufficient rest or water. He believes his freckle trauma is the same as a gay person fearing imprisonment or worse for holding hands with one’s partner at a World Cup. But Infantino was just getting started.
Read the whole thing. As David Hookstead of Outkick the Coverage tweets, “The head of FIFA says Western countries have no moral authority to judge Qatar or other Middle Eastern nations. The West didn’t do 9/11, behead people for criticizing the government, kill gay people, repress women and still have literal slaves. Weak comments from a weak man.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
AN UNSURPRISING DEVELOPMENT: Democrats want FDA to ease access to abortion pills.
GET IN SHAPE: Nice C Dumbbell Set. #CommissionEarned
WELL, NOT MY FIRST CHOICE: A .410 for Home Defense? Is That A Good Idea?
READER FAVORITE: Christmas, 1776. #CommissionEarned
WHO IS BEN SHAPIRO JOHN GALT? DailyWire+ Secures Exclusive Film, TV Rights To Classic Novel Atlas Shrugged.
NOW SMASH SOME ONTO MARS: The pristine Winchcombe meteorite suggests that Earth’s water came from asteroids.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Mind-Controlled Wheelchair Brings New Freedom to People With Paralysis.
THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT COMES TO CNN: CNN Plans to Sober Up Boozy New Year’s Eve Coverage.
As 2022 goes out, so too will a recent holiday tradition: During CNN’s broadcast of various New Year’s Eve celebrations, Don Lemon probably won’t be downing shots on camera.
The Warner Bros. Discovery-backed news outlet wants to pare back some of the zany antics that have become a staple of its wee-hours coverage of the last night of the year. While Anderson Cooper will still be able to imbibe during primetime hours — along with his co-host Andy Cohen — while the duo holds forth in Times Square, correspondents and anchors who may have slurped down alcoholic concoctions on camera (or off) in the past will be required to halt the practice.
The network’s coverage of New Year’s Eve was a topic of a town-hall discussion held Tuesday between CNN staffers and Chris Licht, the company’s chairman and CEO, according to people familiar with the meeting. The coming New Year’s Eve broadcast will be CNN’s first under Licht’s aegis. During the event, Licht told employees he felt on-camera drinking eroded the credibility of CNN personnel and damaged the “respectability” they may enjoy among viewers. CNN declined to make executives available for comment.
Flashback to the beginning of 2017:
● ‘Don’t get blood on the jacket!’ ‘Drunk Don Lemon’ gets his ear pierced live on air during NYE show.
● Kathy Griffin cuts cameraman’s beard, wraps Anderson Cooper in tinfoil on CNN New Year’s Eve.
As I wrote at the time, “On the plus side, at least Griffin and Cooper weren’t the most embarrassing members of CNN’s annual new year’s eve train wreck for a change, but I feel for those held hostage in airport departure lounges forced to watch this debacle.”
THE DEATH OF EQUITIES, REDUX: The Economist asks: Is this the end of crypto?
The more that comes out about the demise of ftx, the more shocking the tale becomes. The exchange’s own terms of service said it would not lend customers’ assets to its trading arm. Yet of $14bn of such assets, it had reportedly lent $8bn-worth to Alameda Research, a trading firm also owned by Mr Bankman-Fried. In turn, it accepted as collateral its own digital tokens, which it had conjured out of thin air. A fatal run on the exchange exposed the gaping hole in its balance-sheet. To cap it all, after ftx declared bankruptcy in America, hundreds of millions of dollars mysteriously flowed out of its accounts.
Big personalities, incestuous loans, overnight collapses—these are the stuff of classic financial manias, from tulip fever in 17th-century Holland to the South Sea Bubble in 18th-century Britain to America’s banking crises in the early 1900s. At its peak last year, the market value of all cryptocurrencies surged to the giddy height of almost $3trn, up from nearly $800bn at the start of 2021. Today it is back at $830bn.
As at the end of any mania, the question now is whether crypto can ever be useful for anything other than scams and speculation. The promise was of a technology that could make financial intermediation faster, cheaper and more efficient. Each new scandal that erupts makes it more likely that genuine innovators will be frightened off and the industry will dwindle. Yet a chance remains, diminishing though it is, that some lasting innovation will one day emerge. As crypto falls to Earth, that slim chance should be kept alive.
In August of 1979, Business Week famously ran a cover story headlined “The Death of Equities.” That year, the Dow Jones ended at 838.74, which is about where it was when the ’70s began. And then Paul Volcker got inflation under control, President Reagan cut taxes, and the Dow ended the ’80s at 2753.20, and is currently at 33,745.69. Will the same sort of scenario play out for crypto, once the dust settles on the FTX implosion?
SMALL AND TEMPORARY. WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF. COVID-19 vaccinations found to cause small, temporary changes in menstruation.
ADAM SAVAGE TOURS THE ORIGINAL USS ENTERPRISE MINIATURE AT THE SMITHSONIAN (Video):
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Bruce Springsteen Kisses Blue-Collar Brand Goodbye*.
Taylor Swift is only 32, but she’s shrewd enough to take her fans’ side in the latest Ticketmaster imbroglio.
The pop princess raged against the ticketing giant after fans struggled to gobble up passes for her 2023 tour.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Bruce Springsteen, a 73-year-old rock legend with decades in the business, had a different reaction when fans balked at the sky-high prices for his upcoming tour.
I’m worth it. And it took him months to say just that.
* I’ll take headlines from 2007 for $500, Alex.
GREAT MOMENTS IN CHUTZPAH: She Said Pays Tribute to the Reporters Who Brought Down a Monster — and Started a Movement.
[T]he cold calls, the knocking on doors, the after-hours research digs, the dogged excavations of data that unexpectedly dig up a big break. And it was that type of work that led New York Times‘ reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohy to eventually publish a 3,300 word article that detailed film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual assault — and how, thanks to a network of complicity, the fear of an industry and a series of huge payouts, he’d managed to avoid accountability for his crimes. It had been an open secret for ages, and a story that many journalists had been trying to break for years. Kantor and Twohy were the ones who finally managed to get enough folks to go on the record. Their piece was followed a few days later by Ronan Farrow’s expose in the New Yorker. And then the dam broke.
She Said knows that you know how this story ends, or given that there’s really no “end” in sight, what happens next: court cases, felony charges, the birth of the #MeToo movement, the backlash, and long legacies of abuse finally being dragged into the light. Not just in show business, either — almost every industry has had to reckon with its share of monsters in the wake of their Weinstein story and its aftermath. Like the 2019 book of the same name, this often compelling drama wants to show you the blood, sweat and gallons of spilled tears that went into getting that story published, as well as the sacrifices made, the threats issued and the brick walls that this duo encountered. It’s a movie that’s not about justice so much as it’s about old-fashioned investigative journalism. Watch exactly how the muckraking sausage gets made.
It’s Hollywood’s equivalent of Dan Rather muttering, “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story,” in the immediate wake of getting caught over RatherGate, as this IMDB trivia point highlights (paragraph breaks mine):
Brad Pitt is one of this film’s producers. Pitt was aware of the sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein decades before buying the rights to the book in which this movie is based on. Pitt dated Gwyneth Paltrow (from 1994 to 1997), who accused Weinstein of sexually harassing her in the 1990s while she was dating Pitt, who knew about it since Paltrow told him when it happened, according to her interview on the Howard Stern Show on May 23, 2018. Peter Biskind, the author of the 2004 book “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film” (which depicts Weinstein as a brutish, violent man who nevertheless managed to charm all the right people in Hollywood), told Vanity Fair in October 2017 that he learned of the incident while reporting his 2001 Vanity Fair cover on Brad Pitt, but wasn’t able to mention it in his story because Pitt had gone off-the-record.
“He made me turn the tape recorder off … but he did say he liked Harvey, despite the advances he had made on Gwyneth Paltrow,” Biskind said. Pitt was also married to Angelina Jolie until 2016 (with whom he had 6 children and a 12-year relationship), who also accused Weinstein of sexually harassing her in the beginning of her career. In 2009, Pitt starred in Inglourious Basterds (2009), which was produced by Weinstein and distributed by The Weinstein Company, and a few years later he approached Weinstein and asked him to produce the movie Killing Them Softly (2012). Jolie said in an interview for The Guardian on September 4, 2021 that she fought with Pitt over that, but he still wanted Weinstein to produce the movie anyway, and Jolie said that it hurt her that Pitt was happy to work with Weinstein despite knowing he had assaulted her. Jolie never worked with Weinstein after he harassed her and avoided attending promotional events for Pitt’s ‘Killing Them Softly’.
After his separation from Jolie, Pitt hired Weinstein’s former attorney and PR fixer strategist, Matthew Hiltzik, who helped kill a New York Times’ 2004 exposé on Weinstein. Jolie has also accused Pitt of domestic violence against both her and their children.
Hollywood is a sex grooming gang, to coin a phrase, no matter how much its power players try to pretend they didn’t know exactly who Harvey Weinstein was at the height of his lengthy career.
YOUR GUIDE TO ARGUING WITH WOKESTERS: Borrowed from the other David Bernstein, a trenchant critic of woke ideology.
BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: Ruko 1088 Smart Robots for Kids. #CommissionEarned
BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Rolling Stone is shocked to discover: DOJ Investigated Journalists for Insider Trading, Stalking … and Worse.
The Biden administration has taken pains to distance itself from Donald Trump’s treatment of the media — which the 45th president delighted in railing against as “the enemy of the people.”
And in late October, Attorney General Merrick Garland officially announced that the Department of Justice will no longer investigate members of the media for their news reporting — including for the possession of classified information. In his remarks, Garland celebrated an independent press as “vital to the functioning of our democracy.”
On the surface, this new policy — initially published in July, 2021 — represents a sea change from the chilling tactics of the Trump era. A little-noticed DOJ report documenting federal warrants and subpoenas against reporters over the course of 2021 appears to show a cease-fire in government hostilities against acts of journalism.
But that same report also records a significant number of federal investigations against reporters for other crimes — including financial crimes, stalking, and child exploitation, according to records reviewed by Rolling Stone. In each and every case, the Justice Department asserts, “the suspected criminal conduct was wholly outside the scope” of the journalist’s “newsgathering activities.”
These contrasting facts leave skeptics with concerns: Could any of the recent criminal investigations against journalists mask payback for unwanted reporting?
Why would Rolling Stone be shocked that Obama administration retreads are hostile to Democratic party operatives with bylines? As Michael Barone noted in 2013: Obama administration cracks down on journalists more than any since Woodrow Wilson.